Tila Tequila AKA Tila Nguyen, Hottest Celebrity On MySpace

As far as unaccomplished celebrities go, Tila Tequila, the most popular person on MySpace, makes Paris Hilton look like a Nobel laureate.

Discovered in a US mall by a Playboy scout eight years ago, Tequila, whose real surname is Nguyen, sits among the new breed of do-it-yourself celebrities who shot to fame using little more than provocative photos and a flashy MySpace page.

She boasts around 2.4 million MySpace "friends" and claims she personally attends to 10,000-20,000 friend requests a day, in between posting blogs and making video diaries.

"It's like being the most popular girl at school," Nguyen said in an interview. "Everywhere I go I get recognised from all my [MySpace] friends because they feel like we're really friends and they're not just like fans. We have this deeper connection."

Named Playboy's first Asian Cyber Girl of the Week, Nguyen, 26, has modelled in all states of undress for Stuff, Maxim, Penthouse and import car magazines.

This week she was in Sydney to promote her new show on MTV, A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila. Set to debut in Australia at 5pm on December 18, it's a reality show with a bisexual twist, where 16 lesbian girls and 16 straight men compete for Nguyen's affections. The contestants share the same bed.

"Because they're in that house for a long time and sharing the same bed and that much time together, things tend to happen," she said in an interview.

But Nguyen, who makes no secret of her bisexuality, rejected suggestions it was all sex and no substance. The show was about "real connections with real people".

"There's more competition between the guys and the girls - you know, they do really ridiculous things to win a date with me," she said. "They have to eat like cow penis and testicles and they have to eat eyeballs and, you know, do really silly stuff."

On the back of her internet celebrity Nguyen has also appeared in reality shows including Pants-Off Dance-Off - where contestants stripped to music videos - and self-published songs like F--- Ya Man and Playgirl Central. The latter counts among its lyrics: "I don't want no love, I just wanna get screwed!"

Yet Nguyen, a self-confessed former "cholo gang" member, insists her fame was built using more than just sleaze and titillation. In fact, she sees herself as a role model who is "very passionate about starting new trends and having people follow". "Cholo" refers to Hispanic working-class culture.

She may not be famous for acting, singing or creating art, but "in a new generation with a new breed of celebrity ... I think that's a talent in itself, to be able to communication with people". MySpace is called a "social" networking site, after all, and Nguyen claims to be the first to have used it to build a career.

"I planned it all out - like it wasn't just an accident that sat in my lap and I was like 'woohoo'," she said.

In contrast with traditional celebrities, internet stars like Nguyen tend to engage directly and more frequently with fans. Her MySpace page and personal website, tilashotspot.com, catalogues the ebbs and flows of her life. She said the internet allowed her to advertise her ventures to a global audience.

As Joshua Gamson argues in his book Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America, the internet has brought about a shift from celebrities manufactured by record labels and networks to a self-made, hyper-democratic celebrity.

"It's easy to get someone's attention for like a second but you have to keep their attention for years and do interesting things to keep them coming back," Nguyen said.

In the US, where A Shot at Love premiered in October, the show is number 1 in its timeslot among people aged 18 to 34. But despite its 2 million viewers the show has attracted an army of critics.

Ginia Bellafante of The New York Times derided Nguyen as "a very well-toned squirrel", for her "sauced-up arrogance" and said she would rather watch a dating show starring Danny DeVito.

Slate.com's Troy Patterson said the series "would seem to have something for everyone with a taste for the new sleaze, an arena where sexual identity is nothing more or less than brand identity".

Carol Platt Liebau, a political commentator and author of the book Prude: How the Sex-Obsessed Culture Hurts Young Women (And America, Too!), said Nguyen had become a sign of the times, where women are celebrated for their "sexiness" as opposed to their character, intelligence or talent.

"Because of the example set by 'celebrities' ranging from Tila Tequila to Paris Hilton (who came to prominence after the release of a sex tape), it seems more difficult to resist the advances of boys interested in nothing more than sex, appropriate to wear revealing clothes, and acceptable to behave in suggestive ways that would have been unthinkable even twenty years ago," she said.

But Nguyen is unapologetic and is quick to lash out at anyone who implies her character is so out of this world it has to be made up. In fact, she says she's "a little more rambunctious in real life".

"Well if it's a fake character then where's my academy award, because I don't think you'd fake something like that for that long and, no matter what they say, the point is they're watching [my show], so that's good for me," she said.

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